"Hidden Patterns of the Civil War" collects a number of interrelated projects on the sectional crisis, slavery, and emancipation during the Civil War era, with a particular emphasis on the histories of the city of Richmond and the state of Virginia. Grouped as "texts" and "maps," these projects use digital tools and digital media to uncover and represent patterns that are not easy to find when we look at particular pieces of evidence in isolation and only become evident when we visualize a wealth of evidence in graphs, maps, and models. Revealing patterns in text and across time and space, many of these visualizations are intriguing and surprising, offering us new insights into this dramatic era of intense social, political, and military conflict.

Text

This project explores and analyzes the topics that dominated the
local news in Richmond during the Civil War. It uses a text mining
technique called topic modeling to uncover changing patterns in the
city's social and political history.

Secession: Virginia and the Crisis of Union is a collaboration between the University of Richmond's Boatwright Library, the Digital Scholarship Lab, Web Services, and University Communications. The project allows users to explore the context and full text of the spring 1861 proceedings where Virginians debated whether
to secede from or remain in the Union.

TextMapping allows you to explore points of contrast and comparison
between North and South, Democrats and Republicans, secessionists
and unionists during the Civil War through visualizations drawn from
five Civil War-era newspapers from two towns in Pennsylvania and
Virginia.

Maps

Visualizing Emancipation is an ongoing project that details when, where, and how emancipation occurred during the
American Civil War. It is funded by a Digital Start-Up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

These maps accompany "Scales Intimate and Sprawling," an essay published in Southern Spaces, showing the migration patterns of black Virginians who
formalized their marriages immediately after the U.S. Civil War.
Marriage and migration were intimately related processes for those
who rebuilt families in the wake of the interstate slave trade.

In 1853, the painter Eyre Crowe visited Richmond and sketched its slave market. This project, a collaboration between art historian Maurie McInnis, the Digital Scholarship Lab, and the Valentine Richmond History Center, allows the twenty-first-century public a view of the Richmond Crowe saw. (Google Earth plugin required)

An animated map of the presidential election of 1860 shows the
spatial patterns of the fractured national political system that
contributed to the Civil War. A similar map of the 1864
presidential election shows support for and opposition to Lincoln
and the war.

These maps were built to accompany Edward L. Ayers and Scott Nesbit,
"Seeing Emancipation: Scale and Freedom in the American South,"
Journal of the Civil War Era 1.1 (March 2011). They show a few of
ways in which wartime emancipation was a patterned, scale-dependent
process.